Review: Inside Man

 Cops (Denzel Washington, his partner Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Emergency Services guy Willem Dafoe) are pitted against master robber Clive Owen and his crew, who have stormed a Manhattan bank and are holding hostages but don’t entirely work from the usual bank robbing manual. Jodie Foster (at her iciest) is somewhere in the middle, as an extremely well-connected ‘fixer’. She has been hired by the wealthy and powerful bank head honcho (Christopher Plummer), to find out what the robbers want, and more importantly to retrieve something important of his that is stored inside the bank. Meanwhile, detective police Washington – a skilled hostage negotiator – is also currently being investigated by Internal Affairs over some missing money on a previous case.

 

Well-respected filmmaker Spike Lee (whose best film is still “Malcolm X” by a landslide) gets his head out of his own butt and proves that he can make a piece of entertainment, putting the social commentary in the background instead. This 2006 heist film is actually interestingly twisty, crazy fun from start to finish, even if you may not fully buy each and every one of those twists and turns. Scripted by Russell Gewirtz (the disappointingly generic “Righteous Kill”), he and Spike have a lot of fun here, especially the way they tease out the details early on. The motives for the Christopher Plummer and Jodie Foster characters are only slowly revealed, although in Plummer’s case it’s not terribly difficult to work out. Spike’s not normally a plot guy, but through Gewirtz’s script, he’s got a solid one here, even if there are elements that are a tad wacky. The motives of the Plummer character, transparent as they are, didn’t seem quite so over-the-top to me on subsequent viewings, for instance. Meanwhile, the social commentary is mostly kept to two scenes, one involving a Sikh man confused for a Muslim, which is both funny and sadly believable. The other clever bit of commentary comes from Clive Owen talking to a kid playing a “Grand Theft Auto”-style game. It actually makes sense for Spike to direct a heist movie set in New York, he and “Dog Day Afternoon” director Sidney Lumet often make parts of New York characters of their own in their films.

 

There’s some seriously impressive names in the cast, but it’s really Jodie Foster and Denzel Washington who impress here. Foster is incredibly ice-cold, and Denzel is entirely assured and proficient just like his character. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Clive Owen are fine, though the former’s American accent is a lot more convincing than the latter’s. What I like about Owen is that his character is equally smart as Washington’s, they’re a really interesting, well-matched protagonist and antagonist (Both characters have seen “Dog Day Afternoon”, for one thing). Willem Dafoe could’ve played his grunt role in his sleep, and obviously just wanted to work with Spike Lee. He’s fine, the role is somewhat thankless. Plummer is well typecast, perhaps a little too well typecast, but nonetheless his performance is rock-solid as always.

 

What a nutty, twisty heist film this is, with characters who are mostly shades of grey. I actually liked this one even more the second time around. More of this, Spike. Please. You’re actually pretty good at it!

 

Rating: B-